a sty of ripe pigs. We got on board and the door hissed shut. My Casio said 8.35.
On rainy mornings the school bus stinks of boys, burps and ashtrays. The front rows get taken by girls who get on at Guarlford and Blackmore End and who just talk about homework. The hardest kids go straight to the back, but even kids like Pete Redmarley and Gilbert Swinyard behave themselves when Norman Bates’s driving. Norman Bates is one of those cracked stone men you shouldn’t mess with. One time, Pluto Noak opened the emergency exit for a doss. Norman Bates went to the back, grabbed him, dragged him to the front, and literally chucked him off the bus. Pluto Noak cried up from his ditch, ‘I’m taking you to court, I am! You bust me flamin’ arm!’
Norman Bates’s reply was to remove the cigarette from the corner of his mouth, lean down the steps of his bus, stick out his tongue like a Maori, and stub out the still-glowing cigarette, slow and deliberate, actually on his tongue. We heard the hiss. The man flicked the stub at the boy in the ditch.
Then Norman Bates sat down and drove off.
Nobody’s touched the fire door on his bus since that day.
Dean Moran got on at the Drugger’s End stop, just at the edge of the village. ‘Hey, Dean,’ I said, ‘sit here if you want.’ Moran was so pleased I’d used his real name in front of everyone he grinned and plomped right down. ‘Jesus,’ said Moran. ‘If it keeps pissing it down like this the Severn’ll burst its banks down at Upton by home time. And Worcester. And Tewkesbury.’
‘Definitely.’ I was being friendly for my benefit as much as his. On the bus home tonight I’d be lucky if the Invisible Man’d want to sit by J-j-j-ason T-t-taylor the s-sss-s-ssschool s-sss-s-ssstutterboy. Moran and me played Connect 4 on the steamed-up windows. Moran’d won one game before we even got to Welland Cross. Moran’s in Miss Wyche’s form at school, 2W. 2W’s the next-to-bottom class. But Moran’s no duffer, not really. It’s just that everyone’d give him a hard time if his marks were too good.
A black horse stood in a marshy field looking miserable. But not as miserable as I was going to be in twenty-one minutes and counting.
The heater under our seat’d melted my school trousers on to my shins and someone dropped an eggy fart. Gilbert Swinyard roared, ‘Squelch’s dropped a gas bomb!’ Squelch grinned his brown grin, blew his nose on a Monster Munch packet and chucked it. Crisp bags don’t fly far and it just landed on Robin South in the row behind.
Before I knew it, the bus swung into our school and we all piled off. On wet days we wait for the bell in the main hall instead of the playground. School was all skiddy floors this morning, damp steaming anoraks, teachers telling kids off for screaming and first-years playing illegal tag in the corridors and third-year girls trawling the corridors with linked arms singing a song by the Pretenders. The clock by the tunnel to the staffroom where kids are made to stand as a punishment through their lunch-times told me I had eight minutes to live.
‘Ah, Taylor, splendid.’ Mr Kempsey pinched my earlobe. ‘The very pupil whom I seek. Follow. I wish to deposit words into your auditory organ.’ My form teacher led me down the gloomy passageway leading to the staffroom. The staffroom’s like God. You can’t see it and live. It was ahead, ajar, and cigarette smoke billowed out like fog in Jack the Ripper’s London. But we turned off and stepped into the stationery storeroom. The stationery storeroom’s sort of a holding cell for kids in the shit. I was wondering what I’d done. ‘Five minutes ago,’ Mr Kempsey said, ‘a telephone call was channelled to myself. This telephone call was regarding Jason Taylor. From a well-wisher.’
You just have to wait with Mr Kempsey.
‘Petitioning me to grant a last-minute act of clemency.’
Mr Nixon the headmaster dashed past the doorway, emitting fumes of anger and tweed.
‘Sir?’
Mr Kempsey grimaced at my dim-wittedness. ‘Am I to understand that you anticipate this morning’s form assembly with a level of trepidation one might describe as “debilitating dread”?’
I sensed Mrs de Roo’s white magic but didn’t dare hope it might save me. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Yes, Taylor. It seems your dedicated speech therapist holds the opinion that a postponement of this morning’s trial-by-ordeal may be conducive to a longer-term